Sidelights

Even after his first starring role in a feature film, actor Ron Livingston
remained largely unknown outside of the cult following that accrued for
his 1999 movie
Office Space
. As a disgruntled corporate cog who stops caring about his job and finds
himself promoted up the ladder thanks to his indolence, Livingston
immortalized the workplace slacker for a generation of comedy fans. It was
only a few years later, however, that Livingston began to be widely
recognized, this time thanks to his appearance on the hit HBO series
Sex and the City
. In 2006, he took on a starring role on the new FOX series
Standoff
as an appealingly handsome hostage-crisis expert.

Livingston's laconic charm is a product of a thoroughly Midwestern
upbringing. Born in 1968, he grew up as one of four children in Cedar
Rapids, Iowa. His father was an aerospace engineer and his mother was a
minister in the Lutheran church. In interviews, he has said that his was a
blithe, trauma-free adolescence, with a newspaper-delivery route in his
teens and a first job at a Ground Round restaurant at the age of 15.
"I walked around in a clown suit and juggled and waved at
people," he recalled in a talk with Jennifer Wilson for
InStyle
magazine. "They fired me when they learned I was underage."

Livingston was already performing in school plays by then, and realized by
his senior year at Marion High School that he wanted to pursue acting as a
career. At Yale University, he majored in theater studies and English
literature, and two of his fellow classmates involved in the undergraduate
drama scene would also achieve fame in the entertainment industry, Edward
Norton (
Fight Club
) and Paul Giamatti (
Sideways
). Before his senior year, Livingston spent the summer of 1988 working at
the Williamstown Theatre Festival in Massachusetts, where he met
Cheers
star George Wendt. It proved a fortuitous encounter, as Livingston told
Back Stage West
writer Cassie Carpenter. "George is a great believer in the Jesuit
principle of passing on good fortune. There were about three or four of us
there that he sort of took under his wing. Later on, when I was broke here
in L.A., I went to work for him for half a year as kind of a personal
assistant—which I don't think he really needed, but I think
it was his way of helping out."

After earning his degree from Yale in 1989, Livingston moved to Chicago,
where he appeared in productions at the Goodman Theatre, one of the
city's top drama ensembles. He also befriended another struggling
actor, New York City native Jon Favreau, who was living in the Windy City
then and doing improvisational comedy. Livingston's big break came
in a 1992 Dolly Parton movie called
Straight Talk
, which was filmed in Chicago. He landed a small part as a soldier who
dances with the star and delivered two lines of dialogue, which failed to
make it into the final cut.

Livingston's next role came two years later in
Some Folks Call It a Sling Blade
, a 1994 project that was the precursor to the 1996 Billy Bob Thornton
film
Sling Blade
, the sleeper hit of 1996. The earlier work was directed by George
Hickenlooper, whom Livingston had known at Yale. Hickenlooper also put
Livingston in his next project,
The Low Life
, which co-starred him with Kyra Sedgwick and Sean Astin as part of a
group of struggling young hopefuls in Los Angeles. The storyline was not
unfamiliar to Livingston, who had indeed headed to Hollywood at that
point, but then spent much of the decade looking for steady work.
"There were times when I thought I would give this just another
three months and then I'd head back to Iowa," he told John
Millar, a writer for the Glasgow
Daily Record
.

That same theme played out in Livingston's next project as well,
but in comic scenes so deft that the film became an instant classic upon
its 1996 release.
Swingers
, written by Favreau, starred Livingston, Favreau, Vince Vaughn, and
Patrick Van Horn as a quartet of friends struggling to break into show
business and waxing nostalgic about the Hollywood glamour of a bygone era
that seems to have been replaced with a cutthroat competitiveness.
Livingston was as surprised as anyone when
Swingers
earned a slew of critical accolades and toted up impressive box-office
numbers. "There are a million ways to screw up a movie, and only a
couple of ways to get it right," he said in an interview with Bob
Ivry for the Bergen County, New Jersey,
Record
of the Doug Liman-directed project. "Everyone was playing three or
four leagues over their heads on that one. The crew was stretched thin.
But everyone involved hit a home run."

The success of
Swingers
brought Livingston an offer to do a sitcom for ABC,
Townies
, which also starred Molly Ringwald and a pre-
Will & Grace
Eric McCormack, but the show was canceled midway through the
1996–97 season. Livingston subsisted by taking small parts in
forgotten films, such as the country-music-scene mockumentary
Dill Scallion
. He landed the lead in a highly anticipated movie project—the
first live-action film from Mike Judge, the creative force behind
Beavis and Butt-Head
—when studio executives finally gave up trying to convince Judge to
cast Ben Affleck or a similarly well-known name in the role.

Livingston's laid-back demeanor was a perfect fit for the lead in
Office Space
, released early in 1999. He played Peter Gibbons, who toils at a
high-tech company in some anonymous part of the American suburban
landscape. Unhappy in his job and with his life in general,
Livingston's Peter agrees to visit a hypnotherapist at the behest
of his girlfriend (played by Alexandra Wentworth, later the wife of
political correspondent George Stephanopoulos). Under hypnosis, Peter is
told he is now free from worry, but then the therapist dies of a heart
attack, and he remains in a trance. His shows up at work with the new
attitude, evincing zero interest in his job, and finds himself promoted
because of it. A romance with a waitress at a local restaurant (Jennifer
Aniston), comic encounters with his unctuous boss, and a scheme to
embezzle company funds with his two recently fired best friends, rounded
out the rest of the
Office Space
plot.

Most reviewers were puzzled by Judge's first feature-length foray,
and few gave it high marks.
Salon
critic Andrew O'Hehir did note, however, that though the
"plot may be a standard-issue office drone's revenge
fantasy," Judge and his cast displayed a talent for capturing
"the monotonous, petty absurdities of life under capitalism: Within
five minutes of Peter's arrival at the sprawling suburban offices
of Initech, the woman two cubicles away has chirped, 'Corporate
accounts payable, Nina speaking' at least a dozen times." At
the box
office,
Office Space
barely broke even, but began to enjoy a new life on cable's Comedy
Channel, and the reruns boosted rental and sales numbers. Six years after
its release, the movie had sold 2.6 million copies, and made a cult hero
out of Livingston.

Over the next two years, Livingston struggled along in quickly forgotten
duds. He appeared in
Body Shots
and
A Rumor of Angels
, and had a small role as the poet Allen Ginsberg in
Beat
, a 2000 movie that starred Courtney Love as the first wife of writer
William S. Burroughs, whom he infamously killed in a 1951 barroom stunt.
When Livingston auditioned for
Band of Brothers
, the HBO miniseries produced by Tom Hanks and Steven Spielberg, he had
little expectation of actually getting the role, but was hired as Captain
Lewis Nixon in the acclaimed World War II drama. His portrayal of the
alcoholic officer was nominated for a Golden Globe award, and he later
joked that enduring the tough, muddy European location shoot was rewarded
by HBO executives when they cast him in what would truly be his breakout
role.

Beginning in August of 2002, Livingston appeared in eight episodes of
HBO's exceptionally successful
Sex and the City
as Jack Berger, a novelist who seems a promising new romantic interest
for Sarah Jessica Parker's iconic Carrie Bradshaw. On the show,
Parker's character commonly referred to him as simply
"Berger," and fans of the show picked up the habit as well;
once, Livingston was in a courtside seat at a Los Angeles Lakers game when
Kobe Bryant looked over and yelled "Berger!"
Livingston's run on the series ended when he broke up with
Parker's Carrie rather infamously via a Post-it note left on her
desk in the morning.

Leading-man status continued to elude Livingston, however. In 2003, he
appeared in a well-received, but little-seen Las Vegas story,
The Cooler
, alongside William H. Macy and Alec Baldwin, and a year later he played
the owner of a misplaced personal phone book in the critically reviled
Brittany Murphy comedy
Little Black Book
. In 2005, he was cast as the maligned English teacher at a private school
in Beverly Hills in
Pretty Persuasion
. The plot of the dark satire featured his character as the target of a
sexual-harassment charge led by vixenish student Kimberly (Evan Rachel
Wood of
Thirteen
fame). "Technically, Percy may be innocent, but in his heart
he's not," wrote Stephen Holden in his
New York Times
critique. "Although the movie makes it clear that he would never
molest a student, his fantasies are another matter. In one of the funniest
scenes, he buys his wife, Grace (Selma Blair), a short gray skirt for her
birthday that is identical to the girls' school uniforms,"
and persuades her to read one of Kimberly's essays.

Livingston returned to television in a new FOX drama,
Standoff
, which made its debut in September of 2006. He took one of the leads as
Matt Flannery, a hostage-situation expert with the Federal Bureau of
Investigation. In the pilot episode, Flannery's taboo romance with
colleague Emily, played by Rosemarie DeWitt (
Cinderella Man
), is exposed, which portends bad news either for their relationship or
their professional integrity. Most critical assessments of the series did
not bode well for its longevity, but
Entertainment Weekly
's Gillian Flynn did note that "the affable Livingston
… was due for a good romantic role" and seemed to have found
it in
Standoff
. Flynn asserted that most forced on-screen chemistry proves dreadful to
watch, but here the pair are "a lovely rarity. They just click:
It's crisp and unadorned."

Livingston was slated to appear in
Holly
, a 2006 feature film set in Cambodia that also starred actor Chris Penn,
brother of Sean, in his last role before his unexpected death in January
of that year. Livingston played Patrick, an American drifter and card
shark in Phnom Penh who helps the eponymous young Vietnamese girl escape
from the sex trade. In a review posted on the
Variety
website, reviewer Eddie Cockrell asserted that "between
Holly's instinctual contrariness and Patrick's blatant
violation of the unwritten rules of organized vice, the deck's
stacked against them. As a rudderless cad transformed by a righteous
indignation he didn't know he possessed, Livingston's
increasingly anguished [performance] reps the pic's heart and
soul."

Livingston lives in the Los Feliz neighborhood of Los Angeles, and is
engaged to Lisa Sheridan, who appeared in the ABC series
Invasion
. He remains somewhat bemused by the enduring popularity of
Office Space
, telling
Entertainment Weekly
's Dan Snierson that "I've had a lot of people tell
me that the movie was their inspiration to quit their job, which is a lot
of responsibility."